I’ll also just throw out the usual message, you don’t have to use the model.
I also wrote up a more in depth tutorial on the model that might help. A Deep Dive into the Semantic Model. This tutorial is written more with existing OH users as the target audience than brand new users. So I don’t go into “what’s an Item” and stuff like that.
See my reply on the other zwave thread too. I added a bit to my last reply while you and Jay were also posting and you may have missed it. It covers some cool things you can do now that you have the custom widget. For me the most powerful thing is to create custom List Item widgets, set my semantically tagged Items to use them as the default list Item widget and then everywhere in the semantically generated parts of the UI that Item is shown it will use my custom widget by default. And if I change the original widget, it updates everywhere automatically.
The other super powerful thing to do is create a unified widget for all the Items for a given device. Then make that the default standalone widget for the parent Equipment tagged Group Item. Then you can just plop the whole equipment on a layout page in one go.
And you don’t necessarily need to code your own widgets. There are lots posted to the Marketplace already with more being added every day. These you just install like an add-on and configure.